Three Cheers for Volunteers!

Last week we went out to the garden and found THIS! Volunteer spinach! Hooray!

We decided to take advantage of the nice weather by getting a bit of garden prep done and putting a few seeds into the ground. Rick also helped the neighbor get more ready on his garden by digging out three tree stumps and getting some major tilling and composting into the beds.

Our neighbor is cracking me up. When he first wanted to do the garden he gave me free license for garden design as long as it included corn and potatoes. Now he’s got definite ideas about what he wants and doesn’t want, so we are modifying the plans I made all winter a bit. I’m actually really glad, since it tells me he’s a lot more excited about his space than he is letting on. We’re adding carrots and onions. He’s from Indiana and missed the corn fields, so we are planting four long rows for him to walk through. I talked him into beans with the corn, though he thinks he “won’t like how it looks,” he’s willing to let me try it since I keep telling him the beans will help feed the corn. But corn and beans are still a few month off. This is what we actually planted this weekend:

Plant something – spinach, lettuce (four kinds), radishes, and peas.

Harvest something – eggs, compost and a leaf or two of that volunteer spinach.

Preserve something – Ah – TAMALES! My friend, Jen, came over on Saturday and while Rick and the boys kept busy digging out tree stumps, we made a triple batch of corn and poblano tamales. We ended up with 90! Jen took about 30 of them home and let me keep the rest. She was super generous and I’m very grateful! We put away enough for five meals in the freezer, and kept out enough for Saturday’s dinner and lunch on Sunday. And – OH were they delicious.

We also learned about making lard – we rendered pork fat both last year and this year. But we learned a bit more this time around. We ended up coming up short, so we added bacon grease. I knew I was keeping that around for something!

Waste Not – compost and recycling

Want Not – Sunday we bought a few new baby chicks. I really want a hen that will go broody so we can have her raise future chicken generations, so we’re hoping the Buff Orpington will provide on that front. We added another Araucana, because I really love getting colored eggs, and I’ve been thinking of actually, finally, selling some eggs, just to recover the cost of the feed, so we added a third – a Black Star. Wouldn’t it be great if one of them liked to lay double-yolked eggs? We had one pullet in the last batch that laid them nearly every day like a champ, but she was killed by a fox attack.

Build Community Food Systems – Well – already mentioned the tamales and the neighbor’s garden. That’s it for this week.